Walking around Prishtina in the last few weeks you cannot have failed to have seen the signs of change. Literacy is on the rise.  The Prishtinases’ coffee habit is being united with another habit - reading. The billboards call to you ‘Sell your TV; buy books.’ They are advertising a new concept, a new cafe for the capital.

It is called ‘Dit e Nat’ and it is indeed open ‘day and night’ for people who want coffee with a side order of books, or literature with a side order of caffeine.  In fact, says the manager, Baton Domi, formerly of Ginger books, they are delighted to see that in the two weeks since they opened they have sold more books than coffees.

There are second-hand books available to read while you are in the cafe, and there are new books in English and Albanian available to buy.  The cafe has magazines, quotes from Bob Dylan on the wall and Beatles music playing as you hang out.  If Prishtina only had a river (or at least a river that wasn’t concreted over) then this place would be on its left bank.

In fact its location has comfortably central but appropriately revolutionary co-ordinates - it is in the block bordered by UÇK street, Mother Teresa Boulevard and Luan Haradinaj Street. Behind the Ministry of Public Services, it offers a new kind of public service.  

I remember a conversation I had with some women working in kindergartens in Kosovo in the run up to New Year.  We were discussing appropriate New Year gifts for children, and I suggested ‘some kind of book’ perhaps.  They looked shocked. “No, New Year gifts are a chance to give the children a treat, not work.  It’s better to give them sweets”  It was an attitude that shocked me in my turn, coming from a family where books were the greatest possible treat.  But visits to some of Kosovo’s libraries and bookshops has made me understand why reading could easily be associated by Kosovo’s children with dusty, uncomfortable, difficult activity.  

When I was at Dit e Nat there was a child sitting at a table with his mother. We were both looking around us in a kind of wonder, at the full shelves, the possibilities we couldn’t wait for a taste of. Dit e Nat is a quiet revolution, a great bookshop and a brilliant cafe. Spend some time among its book, and I can guarantee that you will no longer consider TV, or sweets, to be a substitute.

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